Selena Deckelmann has posted some ideas about a “hacker’s cooperative” for PostgreSQL.

As you may have noticed, Calpont has been advertising themselves as an open-source storage engine for MySQL. And yet there is no source code.

A bit of back-story. When we were choosing speakers for the Percona Performance Conference, I personally reviewed Calpont’s submission and sent them an email on March 19th:

I cannot confirm that this is an open-source columnar storage engine. I can’t find source code or a download of the software. Can you point me the right direction on that? I want to be sure we are describing things accurately.

The response was

Calpont is indeed going to be placed into …

MySQL 5.4 was released this week at the MySQL conference, and billed as the “community release.” This seemed odd to some of us, and I heard lots of comment on it in the hallways. After all, the release was a surprise; the community didn’t know it was happening.

A source from within Sun, who is familiar with the details and wishes to remain anonymous, told me the story behind the release. I want to say that after this conversation, I fully support the release of 5.4 and I want to praise it generously. It is a great step in lots of right directions! It’s good for everyone. The secrecy was a necessary strategy.

The details must remain a secret, but perhaps someday it’ll be known.

Thank you Sun!

An example of a basic MSSQL (Microsoft SQL Server/SQL Server Express) query using PHP.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

$szQry = "SELECT column1, column2 FROM foo";
$szDBConn = mssql_connect("host","username","password");
mssql_select_db("database_name", $szDBConn);
$saResults = mssql_query($szQry, $szDBConn);
while($obResults = mssql_fetch_row($saResults))
{
   echo $obResults[0]." ".$obResults[1];
}
mssql_close($szDBConn);

Comments/description of Example

Line #1

SQL statement that will be sent to the MySQL database server.

Line #2

MSSQL database login credentilas; host (127.0.0.1), username and password.

The “host” is the server name or IP address of your database server. If your host has multiple instances the “host” value would be formatted like so …

This morning’s MySQL Conference keynotes had a number of inaccuracies, but one that I wish to point out is the characterizations of Drizzle. It looks to me like some Sun/Oracle/MySQL folks are trying to take credit, now that they’re seeing it become a resounding success, for the good work of the Drizzle project. It is not a technology incubator, nor is it the “MySQL Drizzle Project.” It is a new database server. It is Drizzle.

The Kickfire appliance is designed for business intelligence and analytical workloads, as opposed to OLTP (online transaction processing) environments.  Most of the focus in the MySQL area right now revolves around increasing performance for OLTP type workloads, which makes sense as this is the traditional workload that MySQL has been used for.  In contrast,  Kickfire focuses squarely on analytic environments, delivering high performance execution of analytical and reporting queries .

A MySQL server with fast processors, fast disks (or ssd) and lot of memory will answer many OLTP queries easily.  Kickfire will outperform such a server for typical analytical queries such as aggregation over a large number of rows.

A typical OLTP query might ask “What is the shipping address for this invoice?”.  Contrast this with a typical analytical query, which asks “How much of this item did we sell in all of …

I’m presenting about Maatkit, the toolkit I created to make life better with MySQL, at the MySQL conference next week.

I’m going to give you a whirlwind tour throught some of Maatkit’s features and functionality. The toolkit is much too large and complex to cover more than a small part of it in depth. So here is your advance warning: I’m going to go through a lot of material, and I won’t be stopping for lengthy discussions :-) The Maatkit documentation is very thorough, and I hope to introduce you to things that could be of use to you, so you can go learn about those topics from the documentation.

Let me give you an idea: when I’m optimizing queries, I open up the output of mk-query-digest in …

Having written about what I think is cool about the upcoming MySQL Conference and the MySQL Camp, now I want to finish up with what I’d like to see at the Percona Performance Conference. Just to recap, this is a conference we created to serve those who want to learn about performance — not “learn about MySQL,” not “learn about database performance,” just learn about performance, period.

I want to see everything. I think this is going to be the single best conference I’ve ever been to. Even the way the conference is organized is exciting. For example, it’s running from early morning till late at night, nonstop. The sessions are also (mostly) only 25 minutes. This means if you decide a session isn’t all that interesting, you didn’t spend much time on it, and you don’t have long to wait for the next one.

So here is a small sample of the …

It’s a feature preview with many limitations, but this is still good news. This has been a pretty severe performance limitation for replication in MySQL, which has prompted many a workaround.

Interestingly, the feature preview is based on MySQL 5.1, which has recently seemed to be getting some significant changes even though it’s a GA release. Does this signal a change to MySQL’s release cycle, which has sometimes been characterized as too long? More good news?

I wrote previously about what I’m looking forward to at the upcoming MySQL Conference (next week!). Now I want to write about the free, community-organized unconference being held concurrently, MySQL Camp 2009.

It runs from Sunday through Thursday of next week, which is even longer than the MySQL conference. It starts Sunday with a day of games, then there are really good sessions throughout the week. In fact, I daresay the schedule is at times more interesting than the main MySQL conference:

• Hackfest with Mark Callaghan.
• Ask a guru. Free advice from really expensive consultants!
• Presentations from “big name” speakers, such as the BigDBAHead pair, Jeremy Zawodny, and people from Percona.
• Predicting Performance …